The Aperitivo Hour, or: How Italy Invented the Concept of Earning Your Drink With a Small Plate of Olives

The first time someone put a drink in my hand at six in the evening and then, without being asked, also produced a bowl of crisps, some olives, and a small plate of things on bread, I assumed there had been a mistake.

There had not been a mistake. This was simply how it worked. I was in Milan, it was a Tuesday, and I was being handed a Campari spritz and a minor selection of snacks as a matter of course, the way other places hand you a menu or a napkin. Around me, people in good coats were doing the same thing with the relaxed efficiency of people who have been doing this their whole lives, which they had.

I have thought about that Tuesday many times since.

The aperitivo — from the Latin aperire, to open, as in to open the appetite, as in the whole thing is technically a preamble — is one of those traditions that sounds, when described plainly, almost too sensible to be real. At some point in the early evening, you stop what you're doing, go somewhere with tables and good light, order something cold and mildly bitter, and eat small amounts of food that someone else has prepared. You talk. You watch the street. At no point is anyone in a hurry. After an hour, perhaps ninety minutes, you leave feeling neither full nor hungry but somehow recalibrated, as if the day has been divided into a sensible before and after.

The British equivalent of this is standing in a pub car park at 5:45pm eating a packet of peanuts in your coat. I say this as someone who has done exactly that and enjoyed it. But it is not quite the same thing.

The origins of the aperitivo are, depending on who you ask, either very precise or fairly disputed. The precise version credits one Antonio Benedetto Carpano, a Turin herbalist who in 1786 created a new kind of aromatised wine — bitter, herbal, complex — and began serving it in his shop to customers who were, presumably, willing to stand around a herbalist's shop at the end of the day waiting for something to happen. The drink was vermouth. The practice caught on. Turin, already the kind of city that took its pleasures seriously, made it a ritual.

The more expansive version says that vermouth was simply the formalisation of something people had been doing for centuries: drinking mildly medicinal herbal preparations before meals to stimulate digestion and generally brace themselves for the evening ahead. Medieval physicians recommended bitters with the confidence of people who also recommended bloodletting, but in this particular case they may have been onto something.

Either way, by the nineteenth century the aperitivo hour was a fixture in northern Italy, particularly in Turin and Milan, the kind of cities where people dressed for it. Campari arrived in 1860, invented by a man named Gaspare Campari in a café in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, which is the sort of grand colonnaded arcade that makes even a trip to buy shoe polish feel like an occasion. Aperol came later, in 1919, lighter and more approachable, the younger sibling who got along better at parties. The Venetians, not to be outdone, developed their own traditions around the ombra — a small glass of wine, named, with considerable poetry, after the shadow that the Campanile of St Mark's would cast across the Piazza, which vendors would follow around the square to keep their wine cool.

All of which is to say: this tradition is not accidental. It has been refined over centuries by people who took the period between work and dinner very seriously indeed.

The food is the part that still gets me.

In its original and more restrained form, the aperitivo comes with whatever the bar feels like providing — a bowl of crisps, some olives, perhaps a few cubes of cheese or a small sandwich. Graceful. Undemanding. The point is the drink and the hour, not the catering.

In Milan, particularly in the years around the 1980s and 90s, something happened. Bars in the Brera and Navigli districts began putting out more food. Then more food still. Then entire buffet tables began to appear, covered with pasta, risotto, polpette, bruschette, sliced meats, small tartlets, things in sauce, things out of sauce, and an expanding continent of carbohydrates that, for the price of a single drink, you could navigate at will. This became known as the happy hourbuffet, a phrase that slightly undersells the ambition involved.

I am not saying this is better than the restrained version. I am saying that I have spent more time than is strictly defensible at such buffets, approaching them with what I told myself was casual interest and what was in fact a structured plan.

What the aperitivo really does — and this, I think, is the thing that northern Europeans find genuinely confusing when they first encounter it — is solve a problem that most of us didn't know had a solution.

The problem is this: the gap between the end of work and the beginning of dinner is an awkward no man's land, too short to do anything useful, too long to ignore, too early to eat a proper meal. Most cultures deal with this badly. You sit at home feeling slightly at a loss. You eat crisps directly from the bag with the vague guilt of someone who knows dinner is coming. You have a drink alone in a way that feels less civilised than it should.

The Italians looked at this gap and turned it into an institution. They gave it a name, a set of drinks, a social code, and small plates of food. They made it the part of the day you looked forward to. They did this not with great philosophical effort but simply because it seemed obvious, which is, historically, how the best ideas tend to arrive.

I have tried to import the aperitivo hour into my ordinary life at home with mixed results.

The drink is easy enough — a spritz is three parts prosecco, two parts Aperol, one part soda, and an orange slice, assembled in a large wine glass with ice, a recipe so simple it almost feels like cheating. The olives are easy. The bowl of crisps is easy.

The hour itself is harder. The aperitivo works because it exists within a culture that has agreed, collectively, that this is what six o'clock is for. In the absence of that agreement, sitting on your own sofa with a spritz and a bowl of olives at six on a Wednesday feels less like a ritual and more like a minor personal eccentricity.

Though I have decided I'm alright with that.

The olives, at least, are excellent.